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Related papers: Hydrodynamics of Turning Flocks

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We reanalyze the hydrodynamic theory of "flocks" that is, polar ordered "dry" active fluids in two dimensions. For "Malthusian" flocks, in which birth and death cause the density to relax quickly, thereby eliminating density as a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-04-01 Leiming Chen , Patrick Jentsch , Chiu Fan Lee , Ananyo Maitra , Sriram Ramaswamy , John Toner

In this note we reveal new classes of solutions to hydrodynamic Euler alignment systems governing collective behavior of flocks. The solutions describe unidirectional parallel motion of agents, and are globally well-posed in…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2022-03-23 Daniel Lear , Roman Shvydkoy

The complex formations exhibited by schooling fish have long been the object of fascination for biologists and physicists. However, the physical and sensory mechanisms leading to organized collective behavior remain elusive. On the physical…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-07-09 Anand U. Oza , Eva Kanso , Michael J. Shelley

We introduce a comprehensive modeling framework for the dynamics of sea ice floes using particle, kinetic, and hydrodynamic approaches. Building upon the foundational work of Ha and Tadmor on the Cucker-Smale model for flocking, we derive a…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Quanling Deng , Seung-Yeal Ha

We study in detail the hydrodynamic theories describing the transition to collective motion in polar active matter, exemplified by the Vicsek and active Ising models. Using a simple phenomenological theory, we show the existence of an…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-01-20 Alexandre P. Solon , Jean-Baptiste Caussin , Denis Bartolo , Hugues Chaté , Julien Tailleur

Seminal works on animal collectives started proposing a diffusive model (overdamped) for the information transfer occurring in it \cite{Vicsek}. Afterwards, the introduction of self-rotational inertia brought into play an underdamped model…

Biological Physics · Physics 2026-04-28 Mario Sandoval

We present the hydrodynamic theory of coherent collective motion ("flocking") at a solid-liquid interface, and many of its predictions for experiment. We find that such systems are stable, and have long-range orientational order, over a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-01-05 Niladri Sarkar , Abhik Basu , John Toner

We show that hydrodynamic theories of polar active matter generically possess inhomogeneous traveling solutions. We introduce a unifying dynamical-system framework to establish the shape of these intrinsically nonlinear patterns, and show…

We study the stability of the ordered phase of flocking models with a scalar order parameter. Using both the active Ising model and a hydrodynamic description, we show that droplets of particles moving in the direction opposite to that of…

We derive the hydrodynamic equations of perfect fluids without boost invariance [1] from kinetic theory. Our approach is to follow the standard derivation of the Vlasov hierarchy based on an a-priori unknown collision functional satisfying…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2025-10-01 Kevin T. Grosvenor , Niels A. Obers , Subodh P. Patil

Systems composed of strongly interacting self-propelled particles can form a spontaneously flowing polar active fluid. The study of the connection between the microscopic dynamics of a single such particle and the macroscopic dynamics of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-03-02 Benjamin Loewe , Anton Souslov , Paul M. Goldbart

We investigate the collective transport properties of microscopic magnetic rollers that propel close to a surface due to a circularly polarized, rotating magnetic field. The applied field exerts a torque to the particles, which induces a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-01-03 Gaspard Junot , Andrejs Cebers , Pietro Tierno

We study the collective dynamics of a population of particles/organisms subject to self-consistent attraction-repulsion interactions and an external velocity field. The starting point of our analysis is a mean-field kinetic model and we…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-11-04 Thierry Goudon , Antoine Mellet

Flocking behavior is observed in biological systems from the cellular to super-organismal length scales, and the mechanisms and purposes of this behavior are objects of intense interest. In this paper, we study the collective dynamics of…

Relativistic hydrodynamic equations for particles with spin one-half are used to determine the space-time evolution of the spin polarization in a boost-invariant and transversely homogeneous background. The hydrodynamic approach uses the…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2019-04-24 Wojciech Florkowski , Avdhesh Kumar , Radoslaw Ryblewski , Rajeev Singh

As the constituents of a flock are polar, one expects a fore-aft asymmetry in their interactions. We show here that the resulting antisymmetric part of the "exchange coupling" between a bird and its neighbours, if large enough, destabilizes…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-05-06 Lokrshi Prawar Dadhichi , Rahul Chajwa , Ananyo Maitra , Sriram Ramaswamy

We analyse the asymptotic behavior for kinetic models describing the collective behavior of animal populations. We focus on models for self-propelled individuals, whose velocity relaxes toward the mean orientation of the neighbors. The…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2019-02-01 P. Aceves-Sánchez , M. Bostan , J. A. Carrillo , P. Degond

Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-12-04 John Toner

Two hallmarks of non-equilibrium systems, from active colloids to animal herds, are agents motility and nonreciprocal interactions. Their interplay creates feedback loops leading to complex spatiotemporal dynamics crucial to understand and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-09-17 David Martin , Daniel Seara , Yael Avni , Michel Fruchart , Vincenzo Vitelli

We introduce a family of lattice-gas models of flocking, whose thermodynamically consistent dynamics admits a proper equilibrium limit at vanishing self-propulsion. These models are amenable to an exact coarse-graining which allows us to…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-09-27 Tal Agranov , Robert L. Jack , Michael E. Cates , Étienne Fodor